Listen before you speak.
Is a phrase we’re all familiar with. But brands haven’t always had the strategies or tools to listen and communicate effectively. If brands don’t listen to their audience, they won’t be able to connect with them. Stop guessing what your audience wants and starting listening.
Why is social listening important?
Social listening helps brands understand why, where and how conversations are happening and what people think. It also helps brands for future campaigns, improve content strategy and out perform your competition.
Social monitoring vs. social listening
It’s easy to confuse the two. Monitoring tells you “what” and listening tells you “why”. Here’s an example of social monitoring.
Moe’s took the time to engage with a fan and form a connection. Social monitoring involves tracking and responding to all messages sent about your brand.
On the other hand, social listening has five key use cases:
- Gauges the public perception on your brand, products and/or services
- Analyzes discussions or hashtags for any industry
- Analyzes a competing brand, product and/or service
- Reports on how a campaign is resonating
- Monitors audience responses
Let’s look at a success story from Netflix. There’s no doubt that the brand is very successful at what they do. Netflix US has almost 6 million follows on Twitter alone!
Netflix knows their audience. Some characteristics they used to describe their audience include millennial, used to having friends that exist only online, crave attention, do research before purchasing, value peer’s opinions, live for humor and more.
Their social media marketing team keeps this in mind before every post. Netflix acts as every internet user’s best friend. And when they’re not posting, they’re actively listening for new trends to ignite the entertainment world.
Through social listening, Netflix discovered that many people binge-watching shows were falling asleep. Most brand would not see this as a serious problem, but Netflix saw an opportunity to show that they listen, they care, and they are as creative as a brand can be.
So they invented Netflix Socks – smart socks that detect when a viewer is dozing off and sends a signal to the user’s TV to pause the show. Why is this so creative? Because no one wakes up to a screen of spoilers and confusion. The product was cheered, went viral, received tons of coverage, and even won a Shorty Award for creative use of technology.
How to get started with social media listening
Analyzing all that data requires good tools. So the first question you need to answer is build or buy? Do you want to maintain your own social listening tool or purchase one from a third-party?
The next step is to determine your goals. Some ideas may include:
- Run an analysis on your brand to understand with customers think
- Monitor your industry to keep a pulse on what’s new and what would make good content
- Keep an eye on competitors and their tactics
- Identify your target audience to better inform your social strategy
Build your plan with strategies. The goals are your destination and your strategy is the route to get there. There isn’t a one size fits all strategy. Decide what networks you will pull data from to analyze.
The build specific queries to start finding and analyzing relevant data. You can build queries for keywords, phrases, hashtags and mentions.
After you have spent time building topics, collecting data and leveraging all of that information to inform strategies, you can start to look at success. Then rinse and repeat.
Works Cited
Gorbatch, A. (2022, February 25). 4 inspiring social listening examples from brands doing it right. Jeffbullas’s Blog. Retrieved September 8, 2022, from https://www.jeffbullas.com/social-listening-examples/
Newberry, C. (2021, November 22). What is social listening, why it matters, and 10 tools to make it easier. Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard. Retrieved September 8, 2022, from https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-listening-business/
Social media listening: What you need to know to get started. Sprout Social. (2022, June 9). Retrieved September 8, 2022, from https://sproutsocial.com/social-listening/
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